Heat waves linked to climate change; even Pat Robertson is convinced
Experts agree: damn, it’s hot! And you might as well get used to it. At the rate global temperatures are rising, blistering heat waves like the ones that have recently baked parts of the U.S. and Europe will become more frequent and severe, according to climate researchers. Of course, no individual weather event can definitively be traced to global warming; global warming simply loads the dice in favor of extremes. Nonetheless, the scorching heat has led to an unusually vigorous and open discussion of climate change. Hell, even evangelical huckster Pat Robertson, who’s spent much of his career lambasting godless enviros, is a convert: the heat is “the most convincing evidence I’ve seen on global warming in a long time,” said Robertson on his 700 Club. (Guess he didn’t like all those charts and graphs we kept trying to show him.) Said NASA atmospheric physicist Drew Shindell, “This is not like ‘Centuries from now the ice sheets will melt.’ This is, ‘In a few decades it will be dramatically different.’ To me, that’s alarming.” Such a worrywart!
